Cozi links with Parents.com, Hasbro, General Mills

Cozi will provide its family scheduling and planning service on the Web sites of Hasbro, General Mills and Parents.com, three major deals that the 2-year-old Seattle startup hopes will add to its base of more than 360,000 users.

It also plans to announce that Trumba Chief Executive Jeremy Jaech, the former chief executive of Visio, will join the board as chairman.

Up until this point, Cozi has primarily attracted users through grass roots marketing. But with the latest deals, Cozi is hoping that visitors to Hasbro, Parents.com or General Mills’ Box Tops 4 Education site will download a free Cozi application that is co-branded for each of the companies’ customers.

Cozi founder Robbie Cape thinks large consumer brands are looking for ways to keep families more engaged with their products. One of those techniques, according to Cape, is to offer free Internet services that help people save time or better manage their lives.

“A lot of these brands have products that families use, but that is different from being central and present in the day-to-day life that that family is engaged in,” said Cape, adding that Cozi users average between four and eight visits to the service. “What we are finding in a lot of our business development conversations is that these big, big brand companies we are talking to are very excited about locking arms with us and entering together with us into that center of family life.”

Cape declined to disclose the terms of the deals, though the partners are paying for the co-branded sites. Advertising also will be integrated into the products, including marketing messages from each of the partners.

General Mills, Hasbro and Meredith, the publisher of Parents.com, are great partners because they each attract large audiences of parents, he said.

“There is absolutely no question that our demographic is interacting with these sites,” he says.

Tim Tiscornia, vice president of business development at Cozi, said they have received a warm reception from large consumer brands that are looking at new ways to market products and services.

“It is a fragmented marketplace and there is not that single TV show that the family sat around and looked at,” said Tiscornia.

Meredith, Hasbro and General Mills have committed to market the co-branded service through Web advertising and other techniques. (Here’s one way that Hasbro plans to use Mr. Potato Head in its promotion of Cozi.)

Cape says that Cozi will not be “buried in some location” on the sites.

“This is a central offer that these brands want to bring to their families,” he said. “They have a deep, deep, deep incentive to sign up as many families as they can, because every family that they get on to Cozi they establish a daily touch point with. Can you imagine Parents.com to be able to grab a family and have a daily interaction with them?”

Cozi, which in addition to online scheduling tools also integrates shopping lists and communications technologies into its product, raised about $4 million in angel financing earlier this year. It employs about 20 people in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle.